


20 Things You Don't Know About Martha Jones' Married Life

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Multi, Threesome - F/F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-21
Updated: 2010-11-21
Packaged: 2017-10-31 01:58:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, twenty random facts about Martha's first marriage that Sherlock got wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	20 Things You Don't Know About Martha Jones' Married Life

**Author's Note:**

> Written for robin_2370_hood, who prompted me with "scraped knees."
> 
> _Please._ Like that wasn't begging for BBC Sherlock fic.

-

 

 

1\. Mickey Smith is not her first husband.

 

2\. Ephraim Anderson has always had trouble blending in places, and so pretends to be hard of hearing when he doesn't immediately answer to his first name. He encourages people to call him by his last name (because, in addition to being all-around unfortunate on anyone under the age of fifty-five, "Ephraim" is more a name that you whisper.) "Anderson," coincidentally, is the closest in human speech you can get to his name in the mother tongue of his home planet. This is all Martha Jones knows about him when she marries him.

 

3\. His first remark upon meeting her was, in point of fact, "well, could do worse, I s'pose."

 

4\. The Doctor catches her standing around, looking dubious right before she is, for all intents and purposes, going to be walking down the aisle, and pulls her aside, saying in his earnest, aren't-I-cute way, "just as a favor to me, mind. See this, my dear Dr. Jones, is why you should never go around getting to know people's aunts. Nasty business, aunts. They go and twit at you and next thing you know, you're agreeing to extending their nephew's resident visa by having him marry a local." He makes a vague gesture in Anderson's general direction, which Martha takes to mean he doesn't know what to do with him either. "It'll only be a temporary thing, promise. You can get divorced as so as the paperwork for his interplanetary resident visa comes in. It won't be all that bad. I mean, look on the bright side, at least he's not ... well ..." He scratches his chin, and finishes feebly, "Um. Well."

 

5\. "He's a git," is Trish's professional opinion. Leo smacks her arm, and she flinches. "Ow, _what?"_ she goes, rubbing at it and looking defensively sullen, "it's true, the man has all the social niceties of a toad." She keeps her voice down, because Anderson is only on the other side of the room. Martha rolls her eyes and hopes that whatever his original species is, superhuman earring isn't one of its traits, "he's a forensic scientist, Trish, they're all a bit barmy." Trish juts out her chin rebelliously, and Martha adds, " _And_ he's my husband, so play nice."

 

6\. At the next available opportunity, Trish pounces on her again, going, "What about that other bloke, the doctor?" At Martha's hairy eyeball, she backtracks quickly, "No, not that Doctor, I know what's up with him, but the real one, that Tom? What ever happened to him, how come he didn't save you from the forensic scientist with the invisible heart of gold?" "Yeah, how about that bloke," Martha says, voice so quiet that Trish takes a giant mental step back from the wealth of issues it just put at her feet, and doesn't bring Tom up again.

 

7\. "Well, we're always so busy running off and shooting aliens," is how Mickey takes the news, when she gets around to filling out the paperwork at UNIT. "'Spose marrying 'em isn't that far off."

 

8\. Anderson isn't a bad husband, understand, because resident visa or no, if he was anything less, Martha'd toss him out on his ass so fast the stars would spin. He was just very, very bad at being human. "It's all the patriarchal society rubbish, could never get the hang of it, I don't know how you lot managed to evolve," he grumbles, in that mulish, combative tone that makes lesser men clench their fists so as to better punch his face in, but he brings Martha tea as he says it, setting it down next to her laptop without her even having to ask, so she smiles and leaves him to it.

 

9\. She keeps her maiden name. Of course she does.

 

10\. They've a nice flat, at any rate. And by nice, she means, it hasn't been blown up recently by the Doctor, or the Master, or any combination thereof.

 

11\. Eventually, it does get blown up by one of the storybook dastardly villains that always manage to crop up whenever Sherlock Holmes is around. "And, of course, they do it when Anderson _isn't_ home. Why is every criminal in London so _useless!"_ He stalks off, and Lestrade makes an apologetic face at Martha in his wake. She shrugs, because frankly, their wardrobe really needed updating and she's been fancying a two-storey closer to her parents anyway. 

 

12\. "No, Sherlock Holmes is not an alien, you can't forcibly evict him from the planet," goes one of the other officers at UNIT when she calls about making an inquiry into it. "Trust us, we've been called out on him before."

 

13\. She knows, secondhand, most of the forensics team that works with Anderson and a few of the police, but only a scant handful of them she'd be able to recognize if she met them on the street. She literally walks right into Sally Donovan in the A&E as they're bringing in some high-profile criminal on a stretcher after what all accounts say was a truly impressive chase scene; they excuse each other brusquely and move on. Some things really do start as innocuously as that.

 

14\. Sally's stuck babysitting the bloke until he's recovered enough to take to prison, so Martha makes a point of swinging by in between patients in order to chit-chat and bring her coffee, worried at the smudges of color ever-present under Sally's eyes and around her mouth. She reminds Martha a lot of the girls who'd intimidated her in school, always sitting unsmiling in the back with knuckles that pop easy and never looking like much until they open their mouths, until you double-take and _see_ how smart they are. Sally sits in the visitor's chair by the window, heels kicked off on the linoleum and legs tucked up underneath her, and Martha wants her to open her mouth, wants to know what's inside her head that gives her that thousand-yard stare.

 

15\. The first time she cheats on her husband, the sun is wintry pale and cold outside the window and she has one arm half out of her lab coat, the rest of it drooping down the backs of her legs, cell phone and spare change rattling. Sally has one hand wrapped around the back of her head, pulling her in, and Martha probably smells like hand sanitizer and vomit, but Sally smells faintly of ginger, and there, right at the smudge on her jaw, of the ink from her ballpoint pen. She drags her nose along the line of skin right where it meets her hair, until Sally murmurs, "how about a kiss, then?" And yeah, that's the first time Martha cheats.

 

16\. Anderson finds her downstairs when he comes home. She's staring at the dryer as it tumbles round and round; she wanted her pajamas warm before she got into them. Somewhere in the house, their teakettle whistles. Anderson reaches for her hand -- it's the one with her wedding ring on it, she notices with a sour twist in her stomach. "You know," he says conversationally, more to the tile beneath their feet than to her. "On my home planet, polygamy isn't uncommon." It's enough to startle a laugh out of her, and she looks up in time to catch the tail end of the smile on his face. She wraps her fingers around his and says, "Well, it's illegal here, but I hear swinging's kind of in these days."

 

17\. She watches Anderson and Sally snog like teenagers on the other side of the booth, the sounds their mouths make drowned by the football on the flat-screen telly behind the bar. Sally hooks a leg around the back of his thigh, yanking him with fistfuls of his shirt, and Martha will find the fabric stretched into the shape of Sally's handprints when she does the laundry later. Anderson pushes back, tongues a wet flicker, and Martha grins, bares her teeth and runs her fingers through the condensation on her glass. "Can we keep her?" Anderson pants when they break apart, looking across the table to his wife. "Please, please, please?" And Martha throws her head back, laughing for the joy of it.

 

18\. When the call comes in the middle of the night about dead bodies in various states of decay around London, they both have to leave her bed, which Martha thinks is bollocks, but when she comes back one day from the longest salon appointment of her life, it does mean she gets pleasantly surprised to find Sally asleep, warm and stretched out on their sheets at two in the afternoon. Martha wakes her up, trailing her hands along the backs of her thighs and nipping at her calves, her hip, her shoulder, and when Sally blinks awake, she goes, "do you like them?" and trails her hundreds of new, tight, black braids down the ridge of her spine. Sally makes a wordless noise of delight, reaching out for them and tugging, and Martha has to kiss her then, can't not.

 

19\. When she gets back from New York, they tell her about the crack Sherlock made about their affair, deodorant and scraped knees, and they all have a good laugh about it. Trust the cleverest one of the lot to get it all wrong.

 

20\. Martha Jones never divorces her first husband. Four years into their marriage, one of Sherlock's villains guts him from sternum to hip with a hook like a Peter Pan story, and he bleeds out in under twenty minutes while Martha's on the other side of the city, putting sutures on a little girl with a Mickey Mouse burette in her hair who fell from a tree. She and Sally dress in black for the funeral, holding hands like they've forgotten it's physically possible to let go. "Funny, I was actually starting to like him, but I think I forgot to tell him," Martha says on the walk back to the car, the laugh torn from her bleak and pale, and Sally sighs, rubbing at the smudges of bruised color under her eyes.

 

-  
fin


End file.
